


The Cave

by Ria Talla (ronia)



Series: One Quarter of the Stars [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars: Ahsoka - E. K. Johnston, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Jedi, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Mortis (Star Wars), Philosophy, The Force, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:27:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21613021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ronia/pseuds/Ria%20Talla
Summary: Ahsoka Tano, post-Star Wars Rebels/?And there was something else, more important, though Ahsoka found herself loath to do it. Her lightsabers drawn, deep in the labyrinth formed by the stone warriors and the crumbled temple. Yet the words broke certain into her mind.Your eyes can deceive you.Her heart pounded, as though warning her otherwise. But Ahsoka withdrew her sabers, and closed her eyes. Rather than her weapons, she let the Force be her light.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano
Series: One Quarter of the Stars [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1275476
Comments: 3
Kudos: 71





	The Cave

Ahsoka Tano  
?

Beings were not meant to fall through time. But then, they weren't meant to come back from the dead, either. Call it luck, or something greater, but Ahoska had always had a knack for beating the odds.

* * *

Thirteen children sat in darkness. Their eyes were closed, their shoulders mostly straight, their heads held up. Some of them hummed, softly, while others were silent. Except for their breathing, their hearts beating even in their stillness. Ahsoka could hear her friends around her, she saw them in the darkness like coils of blue light. Brighter light pulsed along the edges, curling like spokes along a deeper blue center, they spun gently, each at their own speed.

"Younglings, one of us is letting her attention wander."

Her eyes snapped up at Master Unduli's voice. She was green light, bright and whole, rather than curved and coiled. The others fluttered, breath quickened, there were no other eyes but there was a search, who had drifted, who had lost focus during their meditation hour. Who _hadn't_ lost focus during meditation, really, but even before she spoke again, Ahsoka knew whom Master Unduli was coming for. "Your distractions, Ahsoka, ripple through our entire group."

"I'm sorry, Master," she murmured. She meant it – she said these words, she _had_ said these words. She repeated them like an old song, and yet she meant them. "I had a question."

Her friends were staring at her. Their faces were lit by orange sunlight glaring through the glass walls that encircled them. This room was always warm, and humid, for the thick jungle plant life that was cultivated inside it. Some younglings sweat beneath their robes inside it; others, who shivered in the Temple's stone halls below, enjoyed it. The heat could distract their focus, or maybe, a room so full of life kept the Force close by for the younglings still learning to find it. But right now, she was the distraction, and she felt her friends' eyes among the braided tree trunks and vines of enormous red-and-purple leaves.

Master Unduli lifted a hand, beckoning her to stand. "Yes, Ahoska?"

Half a dozen heads lifted as Ahsoka stood. She was so much taller, she towered over them. No, she didn't, she wouldn't have, then. But she was standing there now, in the greenhouse, tall enough to look straight to Master Unduli's eyes. Something she had never done, when Master Unduli was alive.

"Why are we doing this?" _Why am I doing this?_ she thought. "We already learn how to focus and listen to the Force when we need it. Why do I need it to just sit here?"

Had she really been that blunt about it? Ahsoka felt a pang at her childish voice, at the ignorance of her question. There was a ripple as the other younglings looked back to their Master. And though she knew this day, knew this moment, she was surprised again to see Master Unduli smile.

"There is value in questioning your lessons," she said, gazing down to the younglings. "Just as there is value in trusting those who have had more time to gain knowledge and wisdom. And gaining both usually requires a few questions."

Her blue eyes turned back to Ahsoka. "I will answer your question, but first, we must ask another. What is the Force?"

The Force is a window. A doorway. An ancient struggle beyond any recollection. An energy, a melody that vibrated throughout the universe, in waves hitting jagged rocks, in firestorms that tore through nebulae, in children's footprints racing through desert sands. It was the first and the last, what we crawl out from, as she'd once heard an old Guardian speak, and what we return to. Ahsoka had seen so much of the Force. But she had never seen it like this, a literal window, an actual doorway. A tear in the universe that she could slip through, and not just beat the odds, but cheat them. Maybe cheat what had been coming for her.

_The Force does not know death._

Ahsoka was in the old temple. The _battlestation_ , that was what Maul had called it. She was alone – or more alone than she had been before. The tear she had come back through was gone, the ancient stonework of the Sith, that had been howling with violet light moments before, was silent, and darkened, and had been that way for – months, was it now? Years? Ahsoka didn't know when that tear had taken her. She felt rock slip under her feet, and tried to take in the dark, and the silence. To hold herself in the dry, warm air of Malachor, and recall the steps she had taken that had led her here. Ahsoka took a step, and heard it whisper through the black stone walls.

"The Force is our power."

Master Unduli raised her eyebrows, and the younglings around Ahsoka launched into whispers. The Master let these continue for several seconds, and Ahsoka caught snatches of her classmates' words, what they picked at, measured, what they thought Master Unduli might like better. But their Master simply said, "That is one answer. A Jedi may derive power from the Force. Are there others?"

Several hands shot up. Ahsoka stayed standing as another girl spoke.

"The Force is the energy in all life." Glang had a high-pitched voice, and the sunlight caught in her large, liquid black eyes. Master Unduli nodded.

"Also correct. The Force is an energy that binds and connects all living things. Yet our relationship with the Force is different from that of other living creatures. Who can tell me why?"

The hands went down. Small heads turned from one another, and the whispers returned. But this time, Ahsoka spoke before they could go on very long. She wanted an answer, and sometimes giving even a wrong one got the Masters to that faster.

"Because we're Jedi?"

Master Unduli looked back down, and toward, Ahsoka. "I would say it's the other way around. All Jedi have a special connection to the Force. Yet not all those with that connection are Jedi."

The light fell in slender shafts, caught in the dark like starlight. It made her think, before she could stop herself, of the tear in time, where there had been only a bridge through stars. She knew there was so much more in than the dark in here. Her boot found an ancient line sliced through the cold stone. She rubbed her boot to one side, and the stone shined beneath the layer of crumbled rock and dust she'd wiped from it. She looked up, and around, at the cracked walls, at the scattered boulder of debris, chunks of pillars, the great obelisk that once stood at the center of the chamber now jagged bits of black rock that glinted gently in what little light delved beneath the planet's surface, so high above her. Looking at the shattered room gave her the eerie feeling of looking at a corpse, of some creature that had died violently. It might be still and silent now, but its pain still palpable as a claw missing, an eye ripped out. Ahsoka walked along a crack that split the floor and –

 _He was going to kill her_. There was violent, screaming light, and the great stone cavern that was crashing in great pieces around them, and she felt nothing from him but a deep well of rage. It wasn't for her, it wasn't for anything, it didn't matter. She was just the closest living thing he could rip apart, what little piece of the Force he could make bleed. If she could rise, if she could move fast enough to stop him, would she be really avenging her Master's death, or merely slaying a last sick remnant.

It didn't matter, he was too fast. He met every swing, every twist, he knew her steps because he'd walked them first, and she was running out of ground, the floor was cracking – 

– _the floor was cracking_ – 

And Ahsoka was staring down into the gaping hole that had ruptured through the floor, left when she'd slammed her white lightsabers down into the stone. It wouldn't have saved her, he'd taken one more swing as he'd fallen that would have sliced right through her, if she'd still been there, or then. Ahsoka looked down, and felt the cavern below, heard a low, familiar song that floated sweetly in the vibrating silence of the old Temple. She lifted one foot from the ledge, and then the other, and found her footing quickly perhaps ten feet below. He wasn't there, she knew that at once. He must have survived.

The only light came from the dim starlight in the chamber above. But it was enough for her to make out a glint among the rubble and shattered stone. She knelt down, and closed her fingers along the handles of her lightsabers, dust and the cold ache of disuse rubbing into her palms.

"How would you imagine not having that connection?"

The younglings glanced among one another. There was no whispering this time. In her mind, Ahsoka now felt the strange twist of the question, that left her and her classmates uncertain. How do you _not_ know something that you've always known?

Master Unduli gave them time nonetheless, but Ahsoka felt she wasn't really expecting any answer. Once the silence had stretched on, uncertain and growing uncomfortable, she turned her eyes back to Ahsoka. "Sit down, and all of you, close your eyes. We will start the exercise again, but this time, I'll give you a path through which to direct your thoughts."

This relieved the younglings' silence, and there was a hum of anticipation as Ahoska returned the floor. The others shifted back into a comfortable sitting position. A path-guided meditation was usually more interesting to the young ones – Ahsoka felt that restless trickle of impatience every time she heard the words "clear your mind." She didn't want a clear mind. She always wanted to be going somewhere. She shut her eyes, retreated from the sunlight shining through the windows and tried to quiet the gentle pulse she felt from the plant life that surrounded them, but she soon realized that unlike her, Master Unduli wasn't in any hurry.

"Four thousand years ago," Ahsoka's shoulders slumped already, "long before our Republic of today, and before the Jedi Order built the foundations of this Temple, there lived a Jedi Master whom we call Vokara, who left us some of the most influential philosophical writings on our understanding of knowledge, learning, and our own perspectives. Vokara described her homeworld as rocky outcroppings that reached out above cold oceans. For your guided path, I want you to see her birthplace as she described it.

"First, imagine yourself in a cave."

Ahsoka didn't have to work very hard at it. The shattered stone had collapsed into narrow, happenstance caverns, cutting paths that only seemed to lead her deeper into the cracked heart of the Temple. Survival instincts would say she was going the wrong way. Up, up, toward the little light that still fell in narrow shafts through the caverns. Dig and claw through the rock if she had to, deeper could only mean farther from the light, from the thin, dusty air of Malachor's surface, from anything that could help her live.

"The Force finds its way into all things," Luminara said. "Master Vokara wrote that as a child, she would chase lampmice, small rodents whose fur and eyes glowed in the dark of the caves she was raised in. Lampmice lived their entire lives in those caves, ever seeing only what their own soft glow allowed them. Vokara considered how those creatures must have understood their world. If they had a word for 'world,' for 'universe' even, it would mean just a handful of rough stone walls."

There was a break. The air was colder, but also clearer, she could take a deep breath and not feel stone dust clouding her throat. Ahsoka came to a halt at a narrow ledge, one she could sense more than see, as the cavern she had been burrowing deeper into opened out into some great clear space. She wasn't sure exactly what was above her now, if anything was. There was darkness above, below, and ahead nothing. But she felt the slant of the stone – a wall, or really, the great stone pyramid they had climbed to reach the chamber and the Sith holocron above. It was crumbling in on itself now, she had emerged from fault line that had burst though it.

She could feel the slant of what remained of its stone face. It was still enormous, but misshapen now, other lines ripped through it, its peak crumbled down alongside it. Ahsoka saw those stones fall down along its slanted walls, felt where they hit the ground and cracked, heard the shattering rock. She felt the distance down to the surface below, and the climb up.

Ahsoka shuffled her boots right to the edge, and tipped her toes forward. In a gust of cold wind, she slid down the great black stone, the Force catching under her hands, her arms as the wind did, lending her balance as she glided down the Temple's ancient face.

At the right moment, as she felt the ground rushing faster and faster toward her, Ahsoka pushed off from the stone. She leapt forward into the air, and curled her body, trying to land in something of an elegant somersault. It nearly worked – if she could see anything, it would have been a graceful flip that finished with her standing straight up, her feet firmly on the stone. Instead, her feet hit the ground, but she couldn't quite stop her momentum after one rotation. She slammed her hands to the ground, and her knees followed. But she was unharmed, and the world was still again.

It was also still dark. Ahsoka drew herself up to her feet, and reached to her hips. 

"Now, as you picture this cave in your mind, imagine that you can see what Master Vokara saw millennia ago, what is the first thing you'll need?"

There was silence in the chamber. With her eyes closed, Ahsoka couldn't see the faces of the other younglings, but she imagined they were just as confused as she was. The first thing? Was there an order to imagining things? She knew what a cave looked like. Maybe not the ones this ancient master had lived in, but she could picture dirt and carved rock and water dripping down from stalactites above her. Which of those was she supposed to choose first? Which of those did she 'need'?

And then a voice came softly, from her right, and drove Ahsoka's crowded questions from her mind with its simple, obvious answer.

"Light. We'll need light to see it."

"That's right, Barriss," Master Unduli answered. "We can only see the cave at all if we have light. But there's something that always comes with light. Do you know what it is?"

There was another pause, a quiet breath among the younglings, but Barriss answered this as well.

"Shadows."

The light off her sabers was at first so bright it made her eyes ache. She had been walking this place long enough that she'd forgotten how dark it really was. What Ahsoka realized next was that her right blade had ignited centimeters from a thick mass of stone. It was at first a black mass in the corner of her eye, and she stumbled back. Her light now blazing over it, she saw that it was one of the many petrified bodies they had walked among earlier. Hours earlier, months, years – she didn't know, but it hadn't mattered down here. These bodies were unchanged. 

Ahsoka lowered her blade from the stone figure, and took a step back. Even as she did, she could feel another, just a meter or so from where her feet had settled. There were great shards of rocks scattered among them now, yet the collapse of the temple seemed to have left the hundreds or thousands of frozen warriors in relative peace. It made her uneasy, as she lifted her sabers and watched their forms – some standing tall, some bent forward, all still engaged in a now-eternal battle – flicker like shadows under her light. 

There were times, for everyone, when it could be hard to tell intuition from superstition. Ahsoka shook off her unease, and began to wend her way through the stone figures.

"Master Vokara wrote that from a young age, she studied the lampmice, and observed how they avoided predators. Most creatures in the caves were blind, but the lampmice, she realized, could perceive even subtle changes in light. Like us, they had light, and they had shadow, and they used these to navigate their world."

At this, Master Unduli paused. Ahsoka was trying to focus on her cave, on her light, on shivering shadows, on cavernous walls that reached so high she couldn't make out anything in the darkness above her. But she also felt the chill of light retreating from her skin, and she knew that beyond this room where the younglings were gathered with their master, evening was settling in on Coruscant, the sunlight fading from the wide windows. 

"What she," their Master continued, "and what we can conclude about this, is that lampmice don't perceive their predator. They perceive their predator's _shadow_."

They were different, now.

 _No_ , Ahsoka reminded herself. They weren't what was different. 

Yet they drew her eyes much more than they had before, and she wasn't sure why. Every time she blinked, it was to the stone remnants of an outstretched hand or bowed head, or the glint off a fallen lightsaber. Maybe it was the way they caught her light, or that she'd had a path before. She'd had the Inquisitors to think on, and whatever supposed secret of the Sith was waiting for them in the Temple. 

The bright light from her lightsabers flickered off petrified faces, along the eyeslits in the masks some of them still bore. It lent the eerie quality of unseeing eyes following her. Looking more closely now, she could now pick out differences among them. One figure was a four-armed Besalisk. Another had the horns of a Theelin – or maybe Zabrak, if pieces had fallen off with time. And Ahsoka nearly halted next to a figure with the rounded montrals of a Togruta, their arms held high over their head, the lightsaber they had wielded now missing, blown from their hands.

What she couldn't tell was which were Jedi, and which were Sith. In that way, they all looked alike in the stone. _From what I can tell_ , she'd told Ezra, _nobody won_.

Ahsoka leaned into the stone Togrutan's face, holding her lightsaber closely, and only then realized that she had stopped.

It was the footsteps that had continued.

"Then that's it?" She had kept her eyes closed, but Ahsoka hadn't been very centered in her cave at that moment. She just wanted an answer, something she might put in an exam some day soon, Vokara and the cave and lamp mice. And she could feel enough of the restless energy around her to know she wasn't alone. "Not having the Force it's like, just seeing shadows?"

It wasn't until after she'd spoken that she remembered Master Unduli might not like being interrupted. But the Master didn't mention this. There was no pause before she answered now. She had anticipated this question.

"Even those who don't have our connection to the Force feel it in their own way," Master Unduli answered. "It differs among all of us, in our instincts, our senses, what we open ourselves to, and allow into us. Where we reach out to the living Force, those who cannot feel it like a shadow. As they cannot see the Force for what it is, they know it entirely as luck, or intuition."

Ahsoka felt the whirring tension around her ease with understanding, and simple certainty. With the point of the Master's riddle seemingly resolved, Ahsoka concentrated on bringing herself back to her imagined cave. White light climbed along stone walls, empty darkness above, and ahead. She added flickering shadows, wide and low along the cave like mice scurrying along the edges of the ground, winking her light in and out every so often. 

"But –"

The cave trembled as her Master spoke, "What Vokara finally concluded was that when it comes to the Force, even the Jedi can know only shadows."

Strangely, her first instinct was to walk. As though if she could somehow match those footsteps, it would all be resolved. Another was to run, to see if the footsteps would run with her. But she didn't do either of these things at first. Instead, Ahsoka lifted her sabers, casting their white light wide through the dark cavern. There was open space that stretched unbroken kilometers, up to the remains of the temple, and there were the still stone debris, and the silent remains of the Jedi and Sith, only their shadows moving as she circled, the lightsabers held above her head.

The footsteps stopped. The silence ran long enough that Ahsoka wasn't sure she had even heard them at all. And then, there was something softer, a hum not hard enough for footsteps, but that rose off the silence like heat off sand. She turned in another circle, trying to place it, but the hum reverberated among the stone figures that surrounded her. There was an answer for this situation – move one way, and see if things changed. If the hum grew louder or softer. 

And there was something else, more important, though Ahsoka found herself loath to do it. Her lightsabers drawn, deep in the labyrinth formed by the stone warriors and the crumbled temple. Yet the words broke certain into her mind. _Your eyes can deceive you._.

Her heart pounded, as though warning her otherwise. But Ahsoka withdrew her sabers, and closed her eyes. Rather than her weapons, she let the Force be her light.

"But –"

Another youngling, Zhil, though their words followed Ahsoka's own thoughts. "We're not like them, we can feel the Force."

"Do you think what you feel is to know the true Force?" It wasn't a haughty, rhetorical question. Master Unduli's voice was patient, if a little weary, like she had explained this many times before. "Do you think channeling the Force to move objects or see more than your eyes can tell you lets you know truly what it is?"

No one spoke. Ahsoka's eyes were still closed, but she couldn't keep her cave in her mind. She could only think of Master Unduli's face, settled in a calm that wouldn't be disturbed. 

"The Jedi are beings in this universe like any other. We walk through our lives, we can only exist within ourselves, and we reach an end that we share with every other living thing. No matter our dedication to the Force, our study of it, and what we do with it, this is what we cannot escape. Like the lampmice, what we see of the Force are merely shadows, flat shapes that we are capable of understanding. These are useful, but they are not the Force."

Their Master let them sit in silence for a few more minutes. Long enough that Ahsoka remembered she should be trying to focus on her cave, on her shadows, but she still couldn't find that focus. She knew Master Unduli would speak again. She could feel every other youngling waiting for her to speak again.

And she did. "We often tell you to think of the Force as alive, another living creature, to help you understand it as much as you can. But while this may help you, it isn't true. The Force is not alive.

"The Force is life."

And the cave formed in her mind. The surface of the planet above her, a cracked black vault that was now empty of light – only now did she consider that it must be night on Malachor. The shattered Sith Temple, that she saw as a smoldering red mound, a still-hot ember that towered above her. The stone warriors, they stretched far out into the distance, farther than she could visualize, though she could feel them spread across the planet. Their battles must have raged across jagged continents and ashen oceans. They were still, black silhouettes in her mind, burned along the cave like carbon shadows, if she reached out her hands they would stain her fingers.

And there was life. Ahsoka caught her breath, and pulled her focus together on that life. Set a path alight in her mind, winding through the stone shadows that were set between them, reaching out to touch that life, to gage whether it was some small, rustling scavenger, or something more. She lifted her hand –

And there was a blast of fire above her. Ahsoka flinched back as still crackling shards of metal smashed to the ground, alongside something heavier, that _crunched_ beside them. Life – this wasn't life, shattered kyber and a broken body. It had been life. The Inquisitor who had fled only for their spinning red sabers to erupt in the air. There was life in this place, there _had been_ life in this place, whether spinning above her or smashed at her feet.

_No -_

"The Force moves through us," Master Unuduli said, "as we move through it."

" - _looking for_ -"

A voice, and life, life in this cave, but when Ahsoka reached for it, she couldn't control what life she reached. There was the great pulsating life of the temple, whispering tendrils crawling out of this shattered corpse. There was her, and Kanan, and Ezra, scavengers she had led to this place – and those she hadn't, Maul. Her Master. She felt his footprints high above her, the blasted dust left by his ship. 

" - _I'm here_ -"

No, there was life here, now. She tried to take hold of it, move toward it, blocking out all other light. 

"As we are trapped in time, in space, in life, the Force is in all places, in all life, at all moments."

" - _keep moving_ -"

Their voices - _their_ , it was life, more than one of them, and they were getting louder. She was getting closer. There were footsteps that carried across the cave, along the petrified bodies. But then the vault above her lit up bright like a pale sky, not sunlight but a spread of grasses and algae, salty winds and rushing water, and below her feet constellations crisscrossed through the black, made up pointed claws, wingtip bones and small, horned skulls. Life that was here, that had been here, that had only open plains of gray dust to come after it, life that erupted from the ground in familiar birdsong.

"Just as the truth of the Force is only shadows to us, the truths that bind our lives are but shadows to it."

Master Unduli spoke slowly now. Ahsoka's fingers were curled tight in her lap, her eyes still closed.

"The Force does not know time, it does not know distance –"

" _Someone's here!_ "

She wasn't coming toward them. She could make out their footsteps now, at least four of them, pace picked up, and she curled her fingers tight around her sabers. She hasn't been moving toward them. They had been coming for her. They were coming for her. Ahsoka took a deep breath –

"– and it does not know death."

– and opened her eyes. It was then that she realized how much of Luminara Unduli had faded from her mind. The precise shape and number of the tattooed diamonds that spilled from her lips along her chin. How the black cloth of her headdress framed her face, making her presence feel larger. The exact, deep blue of her eyes, those eyes so close and so sharp. Ahsoka's grip on her sabers tightened, her breath so fast, her heart skittering. Because she was there, and Ahsoka knew this, clearer than she knew anything else. Luminara Unduli stood before her, alive, in the silence of Malachor. Except –

"So the question you must ask yourself is," Luminara called – because it wasn't silent, because around her, for kilometers out, farther than could be seen, color was erupting throughout the cave. Green and blue and red, fossilized kyber burning bright with life, the shadows of an ancient battle roaring around them – 

"Is there anything you really _know_ at all?"

– as thousands of hands cracked through stone, feet found balance, and eyes turned, to their enemies, to their allies, and to her. Ahsoka had barely activated her white blades before red hit them, then blue, then green. Sides didn't seem to matter, she caught only flashes of faces in the glow of their lightsabers, large black Nautolan eyes a Rodian antenna braided brown hair black tattoos over red lekku, they were too much, she couldn't fight all of them, even with her own lightsabers hitting striking every opponent she could, her feet darting among them only to find more, and the shouting, still around her, surrounding her with them, " _did you hear that – where are you – what's going –_ "

And there was light, red light flaming from the great pyramid, the great Sith Temple still new, and ready, and Ahsoka didn't have time to warn or scream before that red light flashed white, ripping through the surface of the planet, through Jedi and Sith alike.

Somewhere, Ahsoka's sabers slipped from her hands as she fell.

* * *

_Do you know what time is?_

_In your words it's a riddle, but only because the answer isn't meant for your words. Yet you will need to know it, so we will try to explain, like we did before. This is not easy for us, as it is not easy for you. You need so much and we try to give it, but we don't understand it. So we make a mirror, of you. We make what we can see, and we speak to you through it. We set a fire and let you speak to your shadows, so that you might see the light between them._

_When you came to us, you were three. You had three shapes, and so we made shapes like them. We give them to you again, so that you will know what you must. We give you shadows, because there is no other way._

"How long do we have to stay here?"

Anakin grinned at her. "You in a hurry, Snips?"

It was cold, the wind whipping hard off the ocean. The dark stone below them was cold, the water below them was cold, and the black sky opened over them – all she felt was cold. Ahsoka pulled up her knees, tugged at her white sleeves. "I don't like it here, Master."

"This was your idea," he answered. Ahsoka looked over to him. His face seemed very pale in the dark, but the grin was still there. She ducked her head, pressing one cheek to her shoulder. 

"I don't remember it like that."

"Then let's go."

She opened her eyes again. His black cloak fluttered around him in the wind, his ghostly face still watching her, though he was no longer grinning. Ahsoka averted her gaze, down to the opening in the rock between them. "That's impossible."

He scoffed. She heard it, even over the wind, and it did the trick. Ahsoka's fingers balled up into her palms, her head rose sharply, and she snapped back at him, "What?"

Anakin raised his hands, "Hey, Snips, if you're already sure – "

How could he be so _aggravating_? If she weren't so cold, and their perch so precarious, she might have shoved him along the rock. But she knew it wouldn't matter. He was going to best her. Sometimes it felt like he always did that, sooner or later. She pressed her lips together, swallowed up her pride, but kept her eyes down, tucking her head back to her chest.

"Please explain, Master."

There was at first the wind whistling along the rock, over the black tides that smashed against the cliffs below them. Ahsoka kept her head down, but lifted her eyes, to Anakin, his hair tossed in the wind, so that she could no longer see his face. She looked back, at the rough, mossy stone that rose up into a mountain behind them, gray against the dark sky.

"I told you how I came to the Temple."

Her eyes fell, now to the opening in the rock between them. Tangled black vines climbed up, clinging tight along the stone, eating into it, swaying slightly in the wind in a way that made Ahsoka think of a mass of black snakes. She felt an urge to inch away, but held herself still.

"Yes, Master."

"Master Kenobi was an apprentice then, and his own Master had promised to train me. But before he could start, he was killed."

 _Are you afraid to say his name?_ came her voice, but unfamiliar, like a question she will ask, but hadn't yet. Ahsoka kept her eyes down, and said nothing.

"And not long after that, I asked Master Kenobi how a Jedi could be killed."

The silence didn't need to last long. He added, "It was a different time, when the Jedi still felt… distant, and invincible."

Ahsoka had nothing to say to that. It had never been distant to her that a Jedi could be killed. His dark figure shifted, as though smudged by the wind, glints of his pale face as he turned, but then flinched back from her. "Obi-Wan told me that Qui-Gon had studied death, that he'd said it was a part of us, a part of what made our reality."

"What does this have to do with –"

"He said," Anakin cut across her words, "that death is what makes time."

Ahsoka curled her hands, and the thick black vines squelched between her fingers, spraying ice cold mist that made her flinch back. She hadn't felt herself moving closer to him, to the chasm between them, but now she felt the slope of the stone downward, pulling her gently toward it. She pushed her hands into the rock, trying to slip back, but it only seemed lift the slope of the stone.

"When I asked Master Yoda," Anakin went on, "he told me to imagine building something."

That must have been simple enough, Ahsoka thought, having seen her Master at work salvaging droid core processors or realigning their ships sensor arrays more times than she could think of. She had pictured 3PO's construction more than once, though she couldn't imagine her Master as a boy, and so just imagined him as he was, a dark figure skulking across the desert for parts and braiding wiring across a cheap, rickety frame as the familiar, fussy protocol droid came together.

"So what did you imagine?" she asked.

His answer surprised her. "My mother had an ancient loom she kept in one corner of our home." He spoke slowly, in a thoughtful but strained voice Ahsoka had never heard from him. "She used it to weave blankets and carpets from bantha fur. I always said I could fix it for her, make it run on its own, but she liked the work she did for herself. 

"I watched her, and I memorized the way she moved." 

And somehow, Ahsoka found it easy to see, as he spoke. Long white fingers running along thick dark fibers, tugging and threading, slipping a wooden shuttle down the line, pressing and tightening the rows of a thin blanket taking shape. It was quick precise work, and the unknown hands moved in a steady, unbroken pace as they pulled the disparate threads together into a thick, tight pattern. As she let the image continue, the simple rhythm of each successive step blurred into the next, moving faster until no longer hands and thread but light-and-dark shapes that twisted into and broke apart from one another, drew close and then scattered – 

"What are you seeing?"

And Ahsoka found, then, that the image had grown sharp again. But now the hands were like her own, tying tightly together three very slender threads, and weaving along them small, shining silver beads, one after another, the silka beads she had worn along her montrals. The bright beads were tied into a tight, unbroken line, and then the line was unwoven, and the beads fell, and shattered into darkness.

"This is time?" she asked. "Weaving together?"

"No," Anakin said. "Time doesn't pull things together. It tears them apart."

The bright beads fell, and smashed, dark threads unbraiding and glimmering shards scattered in the black. She watched each bead fall, and shatter, and pull itself back together, back and forth, as the cold dissipated, as the crash of waves against the rock cliffs faded, as there was nothing but the slender dark threads and the silka beads as they smashed and returned, again and again. Ahsoka raised a hand to her face, and saw a shimmer over her skin. She turned over her palm and as the dark leaked into her hands, cracking her fingers into tiny, shimmering pieces, smaller and smaller until there were just flashes of dust that floated and danced and pulled farther into nothing –

_What is done is undone. What is made is unmade. You can only see them apart. We can only see it as one. What is alive is always dead, what is whole is always dust. You split them, and so there must be life and then death, whole and then dust. Do you know what that is?_

– Ahsoka gasped, the air wiped from her lungs. Sunlight warmed her skin, her hands were flat on familiar stone. She raised her head, still breathing hard in the sudden and thick humid air, to a round, bright room, the towers of Coruscant shining through the windows, dense red-and-purple jungle foliage crowding those windows.

There was the orange light of sunset, and there were no younglings. Only her master, standing over her like a shadow. He was silent at first, she saw the sleeves of his black robes shuffle in the sunlight. And then he laughed.

"I can't believe you did that, Snips."

That spiked her indignance, which put more air in her lungs than any attempt at restrained breathing. She forced herself to her feet, voice shaking, legs shaking, "You told me to, you said I could!"

"I didn't want to discourage you, did I?" He lifted his head, turned in place to look around the room. "You brought us to the Temple."

"The warmest room in the Temple," she pointed out. Her trembling lessened as her breathing slowed, and that warmth sunk into her skin. But as she straightened, and gained hold of herself, she noticed more about the space. There was an eerie quiet and stillness to it – after a few seconds, Ahsoka realized she didn't hear the familiar patter of water trickling from the stone fountain that fed into the plants around them. That the glittering beyond the windows didn't flash and flow in the familiar heartbeat of a moving city. Ahsoka crossed the room, stepping to the windows. Beyond, there were speeders and shuttles, but they hung in place. Some were lined in the designated flows of Coruscant traffic, others were angled toward towers and landing pads, but all were still, suspended in place. 

She turned from the window, walking back to the center of the room, to the small round fountain set into the stone floor. The single, short jet of water at its center was frozen, beads of water sparkling in the air like gems, the ripples of the surrounding pool held like glass. The surface of the water shined like a mirror, and she caught her reflection in the orange sunlight. Dark blue eyes, and thick, pale green hair that haloed her ghostly face. She stared down at it until a red flash at her shoulder – 

Ahsoka gasped again, but turned, and it was Anakin standing over her. He stepped closer to her, and she looked away, not wanting to see the concern in his face. "Are you all right?"

Ahsoka lifted a hand, brushing her fingers to her montrals. "What did I do?"

"You brought us to a moment." Anakin turned from her, walking back toward the windows. She caught another flash of red as he approached them, but then he looked back to her. "You came here and only here. What did you see?"

Ahsoka fidgeted, pressing her fingers into her palms. But she didn't make him ask again. She joined him at the window, and reached out, wordlessly taking his hand in hers. Her movements were the only sound in the stillness, as she uncurled her hand, pressing her palm briefly against his, and then leaving with it her chain of silka beads, that glistened in the sunlight. She blinked, and saw the beads shatter once more, cracked to dust that slipped from his fingers, and then gathering back into place. 

"It wasn't supposed to be like this –"

His voice spun and fractured as he spoke, deeper and higher, as though a hundred or a thousand others were speaking alongside him. Like these words had been spoken between them, between others, so many times before, and so many times ahead. She felt his hand on hers, a familiar, dark shape along the light that blazed from her form. 

"I loved you," he said. And she answered, simple, and cool, his fire and his passion empty from her many voices –

"I know."

He broke from her. She nearly stumbled, the orange sunlight was rent from the windows and there was only bright white light from all sides, the floor beneath them black as open space – 

"We weren't meant to be apart."

He called it out to her. He was retreating, disappearing, beyond what she could see but still his voices stayed with her, no space or time between them.

"And now –"

She knew. And she spoke, so that he would know.

"Now it's all gone wrong."

_We are here because you are here. Yet the greater you are, the more we fracture. Your contained forms tear and twist at us. You are whole and shattered, held close and strewn far. Alive and dead. You are and must be all of these, yet you split them, and you split us. You can only see us as you are._

_We fracture, and you fracture with us._

And it was chaos. The sky was bright and then dark, flashing in and out like a flickering candle, vibrant yellow, green, orange suns and vibrant moons that were hung like rows of pearls or single, slender slivers, each day and night passes before she could blink, the stone court below them black but light bursting through, cracking its ancient face. It would make her sick, or it should make her sick. She felt a breeze rustle through her, saw the gentle shake of white feathers around her. 

He stood apart from her. She knew him, but his eyes were a stranger's. Yellow, sunken in his face, he smiled at her, but now she saw his teeth.

"Don't think you've got the hang of this yet, Snips."

 _I hate it when you call me that_. She had never hated anything. But she did, her anger twisted out inside her and she screamed it as she never had, as she never could have, so loud the sky halted and stone stood still beneath them. 

" _How could you?_ "

And the sky was starless, as though she could have blasted all of it away. All of it but him. There were still the cracks, the light from beneath them, and she realized, suddenly, that he was coming closer to her.

Now Anakin's voice was quiet, calm. "You left." 

"I _came back_ ," she was still screaming. Her vision blurred. "I died and _you brought me back_. Why did you bring me back to kill me?"

"Oh, Ahsoka." A sigh, and not calm anymore. _Cold_. "You need to understand." His hands brushed into her feathers, and he pulled her close to his yellow eyes, as his voice splintered across a thousand years, planets, moments –

" _No one's ever really gone_."

* * *

She jolted up. Her arms ached, there was so much light, Ahsoka rolled on her side and forced her breathing to slow. She wanted to shut her eyes against the light, but she made herself keep them open, made herself adjust to it. She focused on that light, until it was just a weak glare off a durasteel wall. She wasn't on Malachor any longer, and that was enough for Ahsoka to know that she was in space. She was on a ship. Her arms still ached, she tried to pull them forward but couldn't. She tilted her head, shoving her montrals uncomfortably against whatever she'd been resting on, and saw that her wrists were in binders, hooked to a bar above her. 

She didn't need to think. Ahsoka saw veins of light, they winked in and out, threaded among one another, she followed along their paths, found how they intersected. It was seconds. She had never done anything like it before and yet she knew, she saw the mechanism embroidered beneath the steel at her wrists.

The binders snapped open. Ahsoka leapt, her boots finding the floor. She hadn't tried to be quiet. Sparing a moment, she turned, and saw that she'd been bound to a bunk. There was another empty bunk above it, set into the wall. These were quarters, very small, no more than a meter from the bunks to the door. Her hands went to her waist, and found her lightsabers were missing. She raised her head, a moment before she heard dulled voices in the hall beyond. 

And she knew what she was going to do, clearly and precisely. As though she were already in the ship's cockpit, vanishing into hyperspace. Ahsoka closed her eyes. Shadows gathered to form the outline of the hall beyond, and the beings moving through it hung in spirals of light. She counted them, and she measured their distance from the door in front of her. She counted down her heartbeats to the moment when she stepped forward, the doors sliding open onto the hallway beyond.

The hall was dark, and round, with thin stripes of light set into the walls and the floors that sent up dim, rippling shadows. Her footfalls were loud on the steel floor, and it was only a few seconds before she encountered the first of them, a human man and Trandoshan woman. They turned into the hallway and had just begun to reach for their blasters as Ahsoka raised her hand, swiping her arm forward and shoving them both back into the wall. In those few moments of quiet, she looked over them, slouched against the wall, finding carbon-scored body armor and a few familiar tattoos. Ahsoka let out a breath, and then moved on. She knew the cockpit was ahead, like she could feel it pulsing in the ship toward her. 

She slammed another of the crew into a wall, and then began to hear shouting. No alarms sounded through the ship, but the crew called to one another, their boots slamming down. She heard one in the ship behind her and picked up her pace. Past cabins, a small galley – standard layout for a medium-sized freighter. She came to a ladder and climbed up one level, spotted a glimpse of space in a turret canon above –

As her feet hit the floor, a door slid open to her right. Ahsoka barely saw the outlines, three of them, as she jumped back, but one already had his blaster aimed, and fired directly at her.

_Do you know what time is?_

Ahsoka saw the red bolt of light. She saw each particle in it sparkle, each twinkling, alternating charge, bright energy woven into a moment in time and space, hurtling to connect with her body. It was instinct that made her lift her hand. But there was something else – 

_Time doesn't pull things together_. Glittering shards rose together, gathering into simple, silvery beads, woven in place along the chain. Quick, practiced fingers wove together threads of light, pulling them into one moment, and the next. She let the beads shatter, the threads fall loose, and then wove them together, over and over, back and forth. She inhaled, pulling every particle together, exhaled, and scattered them once more.

 _It tears them apart_.

Ahsoka had lifted her hand, and the red blast the pirate had fired at her was still in the air between them. The pirate didn't try to fire again – the light from the blast lent a red glow to his bewildered human face. Even Ahsoka watched the halted blast in wonder, a single moment suspended in space, in time, as the pace of all things continued around it. She felt the leash of it around her fingers as she lifted her hand, and waved it back over her shoulder.

And the bolt was released. Though still in midair, it ricocheted upward, slamming into the ceiling above Ahsoka sending a small shower of sparks down over her. She lowered her hand, and three blasters fell from the grips of the stunned pirates, clattering to the floor. 

"What's going on out there?"

She knew that voice. It came from behind a door ahead, what must have been the cockpit. Ahsoka didn't look away from the man who had fired at her, but she tilted her head, and raised her eyebrows. The pirate hesitated, and his voice shook as he answered. "It's – the Jedi –"

The door ahead banged open. Ahsoka turned, not surprised at all to see that familiar Weequay face. The hilts of her lightsabers glinted from beneath his long red coat. He swayed, perhaps reaching for his own blaster but then thinking better of it. It was apparent that while he'd gladly claimed the spoils, he hadn't thought to check on the hostage his crew had brought on board.

"That's not a Jedi," he muttered.

Ahsoka couldn't help it. She smiled.

Thirty minutes later, the pirates had been jettisoned in an escape pod toward the nearest inhabitable moon, and Ahsoka launched the freighter into hyperspace.

* * *

Ahsoka had sat back in her chair, watching the blue-white din of hyperspace beyond the canopy, and tried to clear her mind. She wasn't sure how long she watched, but she tried to hold herself to it, to the silence of hyperspace, and the ever-changing kaleidoscope of light and dark. There were theories she could dimly recall about the Force in hyperspace, about the extremities of existence that beings casually pushed themselves to, both inside and outside real time and real space. Yet the Force followed, always, even as they broke out of the linear paths offered by their sense of space and the flow of time. Since returning from the mirror, the portal – time hadn't felt like a steady flow but a raging, overlapping tide, coming at her from all directions. So she let seconds, minutes, hours pass, let them seep out of her, until they meant nothing. Maybe she had to lose her bearings entirely before she could find them again.

It meant she didn't know when her eyes finally flickered up. There was something in her vision, small, that flashed out of sight as soon as she looked to it. Or almost out of sight, she caught it again in the corner of her eye, at the edge of the cockpit, then fluttering down into the hall beyond. Ahsoka rose from the cockpit chair and followed, along the hall, back down the ladder. She felt a soft brush of air, like wings passing by her, and continued to follow the flashes of movement down. Back down through the halls of the ship, her shadow – and another, ahead – rippling along the dark gray durasteel walls, her montrals nearly brushing the rounded ceiling above. She went deeper into the ship, past the galley, past the cabin where she'd woken, and past anything she recognized.

And then there was a flicker, a turn – Ahsoka found herself at a set of doors, that opened as she approached. There was no sign within of the fluttering light she had followed. This was a long room, a set of cots built into the wall on one side, bright monitors next to each that indicated this was a medbay. It took Ahsoka a moment to blink from the light of the empty monitors, the only light in the room, and then down, to the dark figure on the floor in front of her. 

Master Luminara sat, her legs crossed beneath her black robes, her eyes closed at first, though they opened as Ahsoka approached. She looked up, expectantly, and Ahsoka stopped short. "Why are you here?"

Luminara shifted, and stood in place. When she spoke, Ahsoka heard an echo that hadn't been there before. 

"I am here because you are here."

Ahsoka swallowed. She met Luminara's deep blue eyes, not sure what she was searching for. A holographic flicker, some hint of unreality? She pressed her fingernails into her palms, looking for the same thing.

"Am I?" she asked. "I'm not sure I know what here is, or when."

"You crossed a divide that we were never meant to cross." Luminara's voice still shook with an echo that might have filled the entire ship. Yet that voice was calm, and Ahsoka saw nothing wavering in her gaze. "You cannot return to the shadows once you've seen the flame."

Ahsoka turned her eyes down to her boots on the steel floor. That at least was solid, familiar. "I hadn't meant to –"

"It is not a punishment, Ahsoka," Luminara said. "But it is a consequence."

There was silence, but a crowded silence, like Ahsoka could hear the throng of voices just beyond the edges of it, low whispers tugging at her concentration. She took a shaky breath, looked back up. _What does that mean_ , _am I stuck like this_ – they still bubbled in her mind, but she knew what she had to ask now.

"Then what can I do?"

Luminara might have smiled, though it was brief. She put one hand on Ahsoka's shoulder, and led her to the side of the room, to one of the medical beds. Ahsoka let herself be lowered to it, sitting on the edge, looking out onto the dimly lit room. Luminara moved to one side of her, lifting her hand away as she spoke again.

"You have seen time as the Force sees it. As the Force flows through you, it carries with it all that it touches, all moments, all places. Before you saw just what you could see – our knowledge of the Force allows us insight into what is, and flashes of what could be, but you –"

"Now there's more that I can see."

The medical bay wasn't empty. Clone soldiers were leaning against the far wall, some peeling off their armor to get a better look at blaster burns and bruises. She heard the monitors on either side of her murmur and beep, and the low buzz of a medical droid working among the Republic medics. Rex, his helmet off, was talking to a younger soldier, 9543, who was holding a partially bandaged hand. He looked up, and spotted her across the room, giving her a small nod before he turned from 9543 to walk over to her.

Luminara spoke again. "The Force knows no difference from what was –"

Rex vanished before he reached her. They all did, the buzzing and beeping and murmur with them, the bay empty once more. " – what is –"

Ahsoka lurched forward. She didn't see herself fall, but she threw her hands up, ready for a hit that didn't come. She felt nothing beneath her, nothing holding her steady, there were only flashes of light and color that swung fiercely around her like the brunt of a storm. She saw a sky filled with light, green, red, a burning throne room, low-flying ships cutting blood-red lines across a snow-white surface, a human with red hair awash in purple light, a child nestled in a white pod, a fire weaving light across a cave wall as she spoke, _"There is a wildness to you, young one –"_

"– and what may still happen –"

Her eyes were shut. Did it matter? _I already – I was in that cave –_

Luminara's voice answered. "They are no different in the Force. What has happened, what will, and what may never, they are only mirrors into one another."

Then she felt that presence, Luminara's hand on her shoulder once more. Her voice still calm, but softer as the echo dissipated. No longer just calm, but patient. Almost gentle. 

"Ahsoka," she whispered. "The Force is with you, but you are also with it. You shape it, as it shapes you. You know what it doesn't. Now what do you see?"

She opened her eyes. There was the dark medical bay. There was the low rumble of the ship around her. She was sitting in one of the beds, to her left a monitor, to her right another, both lit and silent. There was no one else, she knew, not in this room, not in this ship. Her hands shifted down, to the sabers back at her side, and she placed her palms over them to feel the warmth of the crystals within.

She stayed there, silent, until she felt the _shift_ of the ship falling out of hyperspace. By then, in the silence, she had decided what she wanted to see.

* * *

She let it happen, as she walked along a row of A-wings and X-wings. Another step, and she was slipping through the rough-hewn caves of Raada, her shoulders aching under her pack of rations and water. The cavern's walls were a dull gray, until they flashed with red light, fierce and unyielding. The pilots around her, calling out to each other, to their droids, became the screams of a massacre she had never seen. 

Ahsoka stopped, lifting her hand to find it resting on the flat nose of an A-wing. She kept her eyes on her hand, using the feel of the ship against her skin to keep herself in place as she recited, in mind, exactly where and when she was. With her freed hand, she rubbed her fingertips against one another, and felt between them her old silka beads, crushing them to powder and them gathering them up once more. The activity in the carrier moved along around her. She looked from her hand to the ship it rested on, the cracked red-and-white paint and a shiny new carbon blast holding her there for a moment, until she heard hurried voices, perhaps a couple rows beyond –

" – who it is?"

"No idea. But the general dropped everything for her, they've been talking for hours."

"What – but – why me?"

They emerged from the row, into the empty aisle between the lines of fighters. The steel floor carried their footsteps, even through the crowded noise of the hangar. It was a young Twi'lek pilot, already in her flight suit, who had run ahead of Ahsoka, and who nodded back to her before rushing away, off down the rows. But Kaeden, who had been shuffling with her medical bag, froze in place. She was dressed in white, her dark braids tied back, and when Ahsoka met her eyes, she saw everything her old friend saw. Miara, green fields tucked among stone hills, Bail Organa's A-wings flashing overhead, straps on a metal chair. And a promise, _the galaxy's a big place_.

Kaeden dropped her bag, and ran across the floor, her arms open. In this moment, Ahsoka held herself in place.

**Author's Note:**

> _Ahsoka –_
> 
> _The woman who quietly revitalized a franchise. I hope to see you again._
> 
> This story draws from a few specific inspirations: Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," which here is extremely simplified and adapted for _Star Wars_ and my needs in this story; visuals from the Marvel _Darth Vader_ (2017-2018) series; and me listening to The Highwomen's cover of "The Chain" five million times. 'Vokara' was taken from the name of a Jedi character in Legends continuity. The sequence of Ahsoka walking down to the medical bay to find Luminara is directly drawn from _Knights of the Old Republic 2_ which I have not finished okay I'm trying.


End file.
